


Thoughts in Purgatory

by chelseagirl



Category: Sleepy Hollow (TV)
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-11-29
Updated: 2013-11-29
Packaged: 2018-01-02 23:29:29
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,009
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1062947
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chelseagirl/pseuds/chelseagirl
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Katrina Crane, trapped by Moloch in a purgatorial realm in-between worlds, thinks about her past and about her husband, Ichabod.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thoughts in Purgatory

**Author's Note:**

  * For [i_know_its_0ver](https://archiveofourown.org/users/i_know_its_0ver/gifts).



Katrina Crane had never had the opportunity to read Dante; by the time a group of Boston literary intellectuals had begun to popularize his work in the early decades of the new nation, by the time Longfellow’s translation became available, she was already inhabiting a Purgatorio of her own, held by Moloch as the Horseman’s prize. But if she had been able to read of the poet’s journey, there’s no question that she would have found the final scenes in the Inferno oddly painful – the souls frozen in the lowest depths of hell, unable to move, unable to even turn their heads. 

All of those years, waiting for the moment when those linked souls would be released from their captivity: Ichabod, the man she loved and married, and the Horseman, once Abraham, once the man whose love she could not return, whose desire to possess her filled her with dismay even before she came to love another. The promise she made to him was the one promise she could not keep, but here she was in a place beyond life and death, held hostage to his vengeance. 

Ichabod, frozen in time, not in ice. Six feet under, sleeping. While Ichabod dreamed the centuries away, all Katrina could do was think, and wait, and wonder. Wait for the witnesses, for the moment she could make contact. For the moment he came back, and found her there but not there. 

***

When first she embraced Quakerism, it was mostly as a cover for her activities with the coven. A young, unmarried woman was closely watched, and freely judged, but a plainly-dressed Quaker nurse could come and go with somewhat greater ease. And though Quaker worship was the antithesis of the coven’s almost baroque rituals, the egalitarianism, their idealism and commitment to all things light and good . . . those she found familiar.

In nursing she found her true calling, in some ways even more so than her work with the coven. Caring for patients, she could lose herself entirely in the moment and in the small victories and hopes, while in the struggle between good and evil, she was always somehow aware of the endgame. When she found herself dealing with wounded and dying men, providing them with comfort, easing their pain, sometimes simply being a soothing presence in their final moments, she could pretend to herself that it was enough. That individuals were something more than pawns in a larger cosmic game. That the fate of the entire world didn’t depend on the actions of a too-small group of initiates.

But sometimes she had to set aside her nurse’s apron, and the plain garb of the Quaker, and be what her family expected of her. What her fiancé expected of her. The first time Ichabod saw her in a fine gown, with her hair carefully dressed, she feared he would condemn her as the hypocrite she felt herself to be. She chided herself for her own vanity at the same time that she found herself anxiously wondering if he found her beautiful in her green silk, if the surprise was a good thing or a bad one.

Loving him was never even a choice; it was an inevitability. She loved what she saw in his eyes, as he struggled with the understanding that what his Crown asked of him was wrong. She loved his honorable nature, his determination to do what was right, his thirst for knowledge. Of course, she found him remarkably pleasant to look at, she was not hypocritical enough to say otherwise, but a handsome face alone, she could have disregarded. Him, she could not, despite the danger under which they all lived, the danger of which he, with his innocent heart, might not understand. This made it easier to keep him unaware.

During the time of waiting, she held these moments to herself as comfort: the long talks and walks they would take, the first time his hand brushed hers, the first kiss, the long, slow nights together as man and wife. She’d known he was someone special, someone the coven was keeping an eye on, but she would have loved him if he was none of those things. If he had been none of those things, she could have risked telling him more. But because of his destiny, the secrets were never-ending.

And the secrets were the hardest thing, because when you give your heart, you want to share everything. Wartime meant it was easy enough for her to slip out of their home at night to meet the circle. He was often gone, serving as a messenger on the rebels’ behalf; more frequently than she might have wished, he was camped out on some battlefield. Katrina had her shifts in the makeshift hospitals, when excuses were needed, but it was a marriage where the time together was precious and rare and the time apart, too frequent. There was so much she wished she could tell him, but she needed to keep him safe. To keep him uncorrupted, as it were, by knowledge that would inevitably cause him to delve too deeply, as some of his brother Masons did, into secrets that might lead him into danger. That could expose him to the temptations of unimagined power, power that his idealistic soul might claim for the good but that might twist him into something else. That was a risk she could not take.

***

And then, one day, after the centuries had passed, he was awake again. She was able to reach out to him, to draw him to her for brief moments, but there was never enough time. Never enough time to tell him everything he needed to know: the coven’s ultimate plans, the Horseman’s destiny, the struggle to prevent the End of Days. Never enough time for more than a brief kiss, embrace, feeling him again after so much time and realizing that for him, it was only yesterday that they’d parted.

Never enough time to tell him about the child.

Only watching, and waiting, and hoping.

**Author's Note:**

> I was so excited when I got this prompt! And then the show kept giving us new (and sometimes contradictory) information about Katrina's past, showing us a different facet nearly every week. My plans to write a plotty story about Katrina's work as a nurse, her connections with the coven, and her and Ichabod's courtship got derailed in a sea of "what will they tell us next, then?" I hope you enjoyed these reflections, and I plan to write more about her when the season's over, so that will be for you, too.


End file.
